Missing People
by Fireglass
Summary: -Just bricks in an alley that begged him, Don't forget me, and a reflection of the better half.- Dean's first few days after Sam jumps into the Pit are the worst. All Dean can do is drive. Spoilers through Swan Song. Angst ahoy! Written for a prompt.


**Author's Note -**

This story was prompted by my wonderful friend Mika, who asked me to write Dean's first few days without Sam following Swan Song. This story was very hard but very rewarding to write. And it's dedicated to her.

I love you, Mika.

* * *

It was pain, always pain, always the same waking nightmare. It was a dufflebag strewn across the backseat, Sam's clothes strewn across the backseat, Sam's smell in everything Dean pressed his face into. Shirts and jeans as a pillow, an old ratty hoodie for a blanket. Dean slept across the front seat that first day, drove a few miles and stopped and slept in an abandoned parking lot of a convenience store where he'd taken Sam for popsicles, a lifetime ago. They were six and two at the time. Dean had carried his brother on his back the whole way there. When he was trying to sleep, alone in the front seat that had been theirs, a Bon Jovi song playing soft and sad on the radio, Dean thought he could smell lemongrass and onions, the aroma rife with memory. He still knew the feeling of Sam's syrup-tacky toddler lips kissing his cheek the way Sam had seen John do before he'd left for work in the morning.

When Dean could finally prize his weary body off the nest he'd made of Sam-this, Sam-that, he drove to every single stop, every one, on a long road of memories. To Iowa and Cold Oak and Florida and Anaheim. He slammed himself back and forth in the seat because he couldn't do it to Sam, he cussed at the top of his lungs until he was gagging on thick, smoky tears that wouldn't fall. Tears tasted like Hell. Food tasted like Hell. The inside of his own skin tasted like Hell; Hell where Sam was, Hell where Dean had promised not to go. He drove for two days, back and forth to every place he'd ever had a good memory of his little brother.

Hands grabbing at jackets to steady a weary body, here; rough, callused fingers carding through sweaty hair, there, just there, just on the edge of Sam's consciousness when he bled or when Dean bled or when they bled into each other. Same blood. Same heartbeat. Tick-tock. They hadn't known it, but always counting down to this. Always counting down to cage, cage closed, case closed, _Sam-closed_. Dean drove and drove and drove, until he forgot what the road was, where it ended and he began. When he realized he was at the shoulder of a one-lane highway in the middle of nowhere, near a broken-down house where Sam had left him the first, first, last time, somewhere between Stanford and Stull cemetery, Dean pulled over. He put his head down in his hands and his fingers gripped his hair, not Sam's, and he screamed. A long, low, guttural sound ripped from all the ashes of pain and death in his chest. Ripped from Sam's eyes before he fell, like a moment captured, blood emblazoned on hazel. Dean screamed and screamed and hurled himself back and forth, chest to steering wheel, back to seat, chest to steering wheel like a punch, but he couldn't make himself wake up.

_It was my job. I had one job. I screwed it up. And for that I'm sorry – There is nothing I wouldn't do for you – Yeah, I know you. Better than anyone else in the entire world. – I just want you to be okay – You go live some normal, apple-pie life. Promise me!_

Not big brother anymore. He hadn't been a brother for two days—forty-one hours, six minutes, fifty-one, fifty-two, fifty-three seconds. Dean had somehow stepped through it, turned into the living legacy of a gangly kid with floppy brown hair and bright eyes. Somehow that was his reflection now. Somehow, who he was. Dean wiped his face on his arm and stained tears on a hoodie that wasn't his, wasn't his, it still smelled like Sam. Sam's apple-pie life. Sam's dying wish. Dean's scream formed itself like a forbidden thing around his brother's name, then, all "Oh God oh God oh God SamSamSammySammySammySam – oh God nonononononono."

Staring down the barrel of Hell, of forever at the fingertips of the devil.

_Promise me_.

Back alley, that last night. That last memory. He drove there. Drove there under darkness and a fine sheen of rain, and Dean got out. He touched the alley wall where Sam had slammed him when Dean had grabbed his arm, to stop him from going, from walking out, from saying , to stop him from going, from walking out, from saying _yes:_ _Don't do this, Sam, _and the place where Sam had pulled him back up close, chest-to-chest, and said, _Don't forget me_. And then he'd hugged Dean, so tight and so hard, the small child with his arms around Dean's neck and sticky-sweet kisses to the cheek. Face buried in the juncture of Dean's shoulder, the safest place in the world.

Dean's fingers had found a home and a paradise and a purgatory in the back folds of Sam's jacket, clutching him so tight there wasn't one place their bodies didn't fit together, _hear that, not one_, and he'd held on. _Don't you even say that to me. Not to me. _

It was just the shadows hugging Dean, now. Just a ghost's arms on a rainy Sunday night and Sam in the cage, Sam in the hole. Hole-in-one, and Dean-in-two, split in half. His better half, gone forever.

Dean got behind the wheel, and drove.

Forty-nine and a quarter hours after the hole closed over Sam's head, Dean stood on Bobby's doorstep. He had nothing to his name but an old car and a bag of things that smelled like Sam, were Sam, and a pocketful of promises he had yet to keep. Dean knocked on the door, and Bobby answered like he'd been waiting on the other side. Hand to glass. Just waiting.

"Boy, you look like death," He said, frankly.

"Feel like I'm dead, Bobby."

When Bobby folded him into a hug, it wasn't the arms Dean wanted. Not the same breath, not the same grip, not the same smell. But he'd always have a taste of summer on his nostrils and a pair of promises still left to keep. One last road ahead of him. Just another leg of the journey before he'd find his house of peace, with the skeletons locked tight in the upstairs closet, second door on the left, sealed up, salted and burned.

Just bricks in an alley that begged him, _Don't forget me, _and a reflection of the better half.

There was a missing person's report, after that. It was called _Dean Winchester_. It lived in the backs of Lisa's eyes and Ben's eyes and found a home in the niche of a ghost that moved and slept and ate and drank but wasn't there. Not all the way. Sometimes they said that Dean never came back. Sometimes, Bobby thought that two brothers had jumped into that Pit together, after all, and the rest of Dean just hadn't caught up yet.

Dean never knew. All he knew was that in two days of driving through an open field of memories, the big brother, the guardian, protector, _one job, I had one job, it's sort of who I am, every part, every piece of me_, curled up inside of all that was left of Sam, and never came out again.

The sad part was, it was the only part that made sense.


End file.
